


Masque

by 7veilsphaedra



Category: Saiyuki
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-04
Updated: 2010-06-04
Packaged: 2017-10-09 22:02:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/92080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/7veilsphaedra/pseuds/7veilsphaedra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hakkai's ghosts, Gojyo's pantaloons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Masque

The mask, a bone-white Italian half-volto with intricate ash-coloured patterns of foliage and vines, was one of the most delicate things Hakkai had ever seen. Silver wires rimed with crystal curled beyond its edges to bear fluttering silver leaves and white feathers. Even the box, covered in watered silk, held the sheen of tempered steel. Hakkai's hands trembled as he lifted it from its sheath of charcoal-coloured paper. He suppressed a shiver. The bone-white colour and blank eyes evoked death, and the frond patterns called to mind an image of a grave in the forest—a lonely place waiting for a body—overhung with ferns whitened with hoar-frost. Or maybe he was just being morbid.

"Did you buy this for me?" Hakkai couldn't quite keep his voice from shaking, then quirked a smile at the momentary lapse. What was he thinking?

Gojyo had been minding his own business, zoning out over his first morning cup of coffee, wobbling in his chair as ashes from his cigarette dangled over his unshaven jaw. The liquor fumes that evaporated off his skin made the very air quiver, but the mask was pretty enough to make even his bloodshot eyes snap to. "Whoa, that's a snazzy lookin' piece of—what the hell is it anyway?"

"I guessed as much." Hakkai dropped the mask back in its box, like it was poison.

"Careful, don't break it." The chair scraped back as Gojyo got to his feet, all fumes aside, a wall of everything substantial he pretended not to be: strength, solidity, dependability. Hakkai, always on the cool side of the thermometer, caught his breath. He became a little too aware of the tiger-striped tank shirt stretched across sculpted muscles and—my, it was warm in that tiny kitchen. He really ought to open a window.

Anything creepy emanated by the mask was flattened by Gojyo. Gojyo was too frank, too—_there_. Too real. More real than lemon floor wax, ammonia toilet bowl cleaner or pot-scrubbers strong enough to scour cigarette burns out of old formica, the cogs of Hakkai's life. Real to the core, unlike Hakkai, who could only manage acting. And that was on a good day.

"That's a beaut!" Gojyo whistled. An elbow dug into Hakkai's ribs. His smile was a little too toothy, his eyes a little too crinkly. "Gotch'erself a lady friend, hunh? 'Bout time. Now's your chance to buy that coffee shop, start pumping out those kiddies—lotsa daughters for Uncle Pervyo."

"Please don't joke, Gojyo." One crisp, fluid motion and Hakkai plucked the mask out of Gojyo's fingers and shoved it back in the box.

The crinkles disappeared as Gojyo tucked his thoughts behind a poker face and a drag on the smoke. After everything they had been through together during their journey west, he and Hakkai had learned to read each other rather well. Hakkai knew that the most subtle shifts in his facial expressions, his most nuanced words came through brassy and loud for Gojyo. And now he could feel Gojyo's eyes trained upon him, picking up on his wariness and watching him for clues as he tried to fathom why the mask had suddenly appeared—to him in particular. Because in the past, when things of this sort were given to him—to any of the ikkou, really—it meant everything was set to ride a fast, brakeless box-car to hell.

Gojyo pursed his lips and exhaled. "Who's it from?"

"I don't know."

"There's a card."

"What?" Hakkai looked around to see if it had fallen out of the box.

"In the paper. In the box."

Hakkai caught sight of a perfectly square black envelope, which contained a bone-white card inscribed with script. "It's an invitation."

He smacked fingers away as Gojyo tried fishing it out of his hands. "I've been invited to a Venetian-style masquerade ball on January 12th at the goldsmith's guild directly across from the temple."

"Pretty swanky!" Gojyo did not add 'for a tutor', though the words sat hanging in midair.

Hakkai considered. Across the square from the temple—as in opposite, possibly in opposition: their journey taught them nothing if not that little things sometimes amounted to very big things. That was if they didn't first drive a person mad.

Red eyes narrowed. "Going?"

One clear green eye stared back without the slightest wavering. "Of course not."

The trip west required improvisation. After a stint where they were attacked so often that they'd barely finished scrubbing clean from one fight before the next started, Hakkai caught Gojyo checking him out. Furtive glances like bubbles percolating off underwater weeds, but Hakkai knew enough to convey, silently, "I know what you're doing."

Gojyo could communicate things silently, too.

Their first hand job took place in a … Hakkai couldn't remember. Probably some cramped fleapit under the buzz of overhanging fluorescent lights and the snarl of flies around the window ledges. There were a couple of places like that, where the smell of disinfectant pierced through noses like nails. What he did remember was how Gojyo had watched him intently and how he was held, trapped, under the strength of all that _there_-ness. Nor could he pretend he was a substitute for a woman or that it wasn't two guys connecting through sex—no, not 'guys': Gojyo!—the man who'd stuffed his guts in, dragged him home, nursed him back to life. It was cheap and sordid and, to Hakkai's thumping heart, indescribably joyous. He never spoke of it again.

Nor did Gojyo, although it seemed to lessen his loneliness. He became mellower around women, hence more charming and (to the ikkou's eye-bulging bafflement) luckier. Hakkai never asked if he actually followed through on any of those offers—he'd rather have died. Whatever the others noticed, they kept to themselves.

After that, they took care of each other's physical needs whenever they could steal away unnoticed. Sex usually amounted to desperate fumbles against trees or rocks. Hakkai had let the very drunk kappa take him doggy-style behind a hotel one night. Gojyo had been surprisingly gentle. He had stretched Hakkai carefully, softened him up with the beeswax ointment he always carried around and entered him slowly as though he were made of porcelain. Hakkai had gritted through his teeth, "You aren't going to break me."

"Shut up, but you don't know shit from shinola, no disrespect intended. I'm not gonna let you goad me. Find someone else to hurt you."

In the days following, they never spoke about it. Why break up an adequately working sex-friend arrangement?

Now that they had settled back in, Hakkai supposed girls were more plentiful. He swept a barely-there pile of dirt into the dustpan with his hand broom. Gojyo never gave him the look anymore.

Hakkai had meant it when he told Gojyo he wasn't attending the ball. He had bundled the mask back into its smoky paper, replaced the lid and shoved it next to the umbrella stand, "For the next time one of us goes to the temple, or if Sanzo comes here."

They didn't trash the object outright. It was almost certainly accursed and therefore too risky for one of the villagers to find, especially one of the kids. Poorer children dug through trash-heaps looking for things to eat, wear or sell. Gojyo had done so himself for awhile after Jien took off, describing the process one night when the ikkou lay snug around a campfire. There was no way they'd throw it out with the scraps.

Of course Hakkai would take the mask to the temple on his teaching rounds. Of course he would hand it over to Sanzo, who would assess invoking a Sutra to purify it. Of course he would stay the hell away from the masquerade.

The cold that night was below freezing, but the winter had been a dry one. No snow was left on the ground to muffle footfalls crunching over frost-covered grass. A moonless night meant that starlight lit the path with silver instead, and midwinter held its breath, waiting, as imminent peril crouched in shadows.

The light which streamed from the guild-house windows shone gold. Even through glass panes, laughter and music tinkled like gold. A golden knocker threaded with chrysanthemums gleamed against panels on the door. Behind the woven flowers, Hakkai caught sight of an intricate engraving which looked like segments of an insect, but before he could scrutinize it more closely, the door opened. With a glance at the bone-white mask, the butler ushered him into a ceremonial hall that had been transformed for the occasion into a ballroom. His announcement momentarily hushed the room. Hakkai stood out, all white, silver and black, with only a green sabre-sash running shoulder to waist across his tuxedo to interrupt the starkness: death amongst the golden merrymakers.

Only one other figure stood out. He wore a black bauta mask with a scarlet tricorn hat, burgundy velvet and … those had to be the most eye-popping set of pantaloons on the planet, even for him. In spite of the pants, he was a fiery Bloodshed to Hakkai's icy Death.

"Curious who's behind this?" Hakkai grabbed a glass of wine and sidled over.

"Just checking out the local chick situation."

Suddenly, Hakkai's smile out-dazzled the candelabra with its five-hundred candles. It out-gleamed the room's most gilded epergne, dripping with glistening fruit.

"Who can tell if they're hot or not, under so many layers?" A crimson gleam shone behind the mask's eyeholes. "More likely hot in all the wrong ways."

"Ha-ha-ha!" It was the shiniest smile in all creation.

"Hiding their bodies like costumes are a turn-on, whoever must ha—?" Gojyo finally noticed. "Aw, fuck!"

"Ha-ha-ha!"

"Fuck! Man, I'm sorry."

"Why, Gojyo, I don't know what—ha-ha!—you're talking about." Words were so inadequate sometimes, Hakkai decided, as the rush and tumble of meaninglessness cascaded from his lips.

"Please, Hakkai!" Except that words turned to art in Gojyo's mouth.

"Really, your language, it's too much!"

"I'm such an asshole." … Vulgarity aside, because at least when Gojyo saw the heart of a matter, he spoke to it—a skill which seemed to elude Hakkai.

"I think with my dick too much. It doesn't mean anything."

"In which case, it seems I'm making mountains out of molehills."

"Ow!"

Hakkai was more embarrassed than anything, or so he told himself—embarrassed because he knew the score _vis á vis_ Gojyo's women and himself. Since his brains had turned to mush under the shock of his own feelings, however, Hakkai fled. Better that than to start eviscerating things.

Doors swung open onto a back garden. Night and cold suited him. Stardust mimicked his guts, which felt as though they had been blown in tiny particles across the void. A scattering of braziers kept the cold and dark at bay, if the sense of personal annihilation was now all that more intense for being alone with it. At least he could breathe here, something that hadn't been an option back in the ballroom.

The usual arrangement under these sorts of circumstances (as Hakkai understood it) went like this: Gojyo—and anyone else who might be involved—took note and frantically modified their behaviour on the sly before Hakkai felt forced to take strategic action. The ikkou were terrified of Hakkai's strategic actions; he had trained them all so well. A deranged arrangement, perhaps, but it worked for Hakkai. At least it worked for things like confining the gestation and birth of trash to within hotel room walls, or paying servers their tips, or ensuring cold-sufferers on road trips wore breath masks at all times. This wasn't one of those times. Self-loathing crawled over him, pinching, stinging, tangling up his guts as though they were bound in his own vines.

He didn't expect Gojyo to follow him. He wasn't prepared for strong arms to circle him from behind, gathering him in, gathering him up against a warm chest before all his fragmented feelings had dispersed too far. Gojyo's arms felt more wonderful than anything, and Hakkai sank in unconditional surrender, child-like and helpless. They stood there, silent … reverent, until his heart stitched itself together again.

"No more masks, 'kay?" The arms turned Hakkai around so that he was trapped again under Gojyo's brutally _there_ stare. The pointy-chinned bauta was gone.

"You're just jealous because mine's more elegant than yours!" Hakkai reached for his half-volto.

"Let me," Gojyo pushed his hands away and slowly, gently, peeled the mask off his lover's face. "There's the real beauty."

"Shush!" The rush of night air startled Hakkai, woke him up. "You're making me sound like a menopausal virgin."

"Heh! As long as I get to deflower you."

Gojyo's arms felt so snug that Hakkai couldn't quite muster the heart to reach up, grab him by the nostrils and twist really hard.

"I noticed something," Gojyo turned the mask over to the pattern of fern fronds and vines, "you might want to see."

Hakkai saw it. They weren't plants at all, but segments of an insect. As Hakkai watched, aghast, they sprouted hundreds of wriggling pinchers to form a centipede. And then, to his horror, the centipede began to crawl!

"Ew, shit!" Gojyo tossed the mask away before the silvery insect could crawl off the edges and wind down his wrists. It flew through the air and landed, quite by chance, in a brazier. There it instantly exploded into flames, crackling, popping and setting off streams of sparks into the night's blackness all around them.

As it burnt, all the tinkling laughs and music disappeared, followed by the braziers with their flaming coals, and last of all, the golden lights. Hakkai and Gojyo were left standing—stunned, but relieved—in a patch of weeds behind an ancient and unused building. The window casements, like the empty eye-sockets of masks and skulls, were so hollow that they swallowed light.

"Ghosts." Gojyo declared.

"Chin Yisou's calling card," Hakkai clarified. His eyes fell upon Gojyo's rented mask, which lay on the tumbled-down balustrade where he had dropped it.

"Jerk. Never gives up, does he?"

"He's dead. There's nothing left for him to give up." Hakkai picked it off the rickety steps.

"When will he get the message?"

Hakkai's lips tightened. There was no one left to get any messages.

"He seems to have rigged a series of booby-traps." Bitterness poisoned Hakkai's voice. "The way that centipede came alive when you held that mask … He's still after the people I—He's still trying to destroy everyone I—"

Gojyo fumbled for his cigarettes. When he couldn't find any, he streamed forth with a long diatribe about fuck-ugly costumes with no pockets and pantaloons which looked like an entire city of clowns could fit in them, but still managed to ride up, and ended with, "No giant centi-frikkin'-pedes are jumping out of this hole, Hakkai. The place is dead. Let's go home so I can peel off these crotch-grabbers, have a smoke and hump you 'til you're begging for my well-lubed screwing tube, my tower of love power, my heat-seeking sex-missile, my--"

"Gojyo, please! You're interrupting my thoughts."

"Well, yeah, that's kinda the point."

Karma wasn't always some one-strike calamity deal, Hakkai figured, but an ebbing, flowing backwash. As long as some force or another pushed or pulled at it—something he thought he'd taken care of by killing every last person, every last relation, but for whom Chin Yisou substituted cursed things: masks, puppets— "I'll have to watch out for these tricks for the rest of my life."

Gojyo was in the midst of nicotine withdrawal.

"Okay, okay. We already knew that. We kinda figured there was no way we'd caught all Chin-chan's tricks after Sanzo plugged Chin-chan's Shikigami—Shit! And now I'm starting to sound like Mary-fucking-Poppins," he started to sing off-key, " _'Chin-chan's shikigami, Chin-chan's trick-igami, Chin-sham-sheroo!'_"

He broke off with a smoking-induced fit of coughs. "Wanna know somethin', Hakkai?"

Gojyo reached over and gently but firmly lifted Hakkai's chin so that he was forced to look him straight in the eye. Hakkai, cornered, surrendered to the immediacy of Gojyo's _there_-ness. He straightened up and stared back with all the clarity of his own considerable prescience.

"You kinda have a way of making up ghosts where there aren't any."

"Excuse me?" Coldness flooded back. "What are you talking about? You saw what happened."

Gojyo lifted an eyebrow, and Hakkai remembered the scene he had created in the phantom ballroom. That was how Gojyo told him there were no "chicks". There never had been.

"What about you, Gojyo? You're one to talk. Why did you follow me?"

"Are you nuts? Even if this mask was a legitimate gift, you figured I'd let some lady-friend make a play for you?"

Hakkai reeled as that sank in. One more centipede, exterminated; one more vine, uprooted.

"Home. Smoke. Fuck. In that order," Gojyo demanded. "Sound good?"

A fierce, overriding joy released the pressure from Hakkai's heart. "Sounds fine."

_-fin-_


End file.
